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French Historical Studies 2009 32(2):279-312; DOI:10.1215/00161071-2008-020
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"The Harem Revealed" and the Islamic-French Family: Aline de Lens and a French Woman's Orient in Lyautey's Morocco

Ellen Amster

Aline Réveillaud de Lens (1881–1925) became a celebrated novelist, painter, patroness of native arts, and ethnographer during the French Protectorate in Morocco. The wife of a colonial officer, de Lens adopted Moroccan children and used them as ethnographic material for her orientalist novels. Her biography illustrates the culture of sociability between French colonials and Moroccans created by Resident General Hubert Lyautey's military protectorate government (1912–25) and the paradox of Lyautey's "respect" for Muslim culture. Unlike other women visitors to the harem (Edith Wharton, Lady Drummond Hay, Mary Wortley Montague, et al.), de Lens claimed to be a demi-musulmane herself and attempted to create a Franco-Muslim female social world and family. The simultaneity of her private journal and public art reveals the relationship between a woman's lived reality in French North Africa and the production of orientalist fantasy. De Lens may have created a "woman's Orient," but it was one particular to herself.

Aline Réveillaud de Lens (1881–1925), écrivain, peintre, patronne des arts indigènes marocains, et ethnographe pendant la période du Protectorat français au Maroc, était la femme d'un officier du service coloniale. Au Maroc, elle s'est créé une vie « francomarocaine » ; les Réveillauds ont préféré la société indigène à la société coloniale. Mme. de Lens a adopté des enfants marocains, et elle les a utilisés comme modèles ethnographiques dans ses romans orientalistes. Elle se présentait comme « demi-musulmane » et comme membre de la société féminine musulmane, une image différente des voyageuses anglophones comme Edith Wharton, Lady Drummond Hay et Mary Wortley Montague. L'histoire de sa vie et son œuvre illuminent la sociabilité franco-musulmane pendant le Protectorat de Hubert Lyautey (1912–25), les paradoxes de sa politique d'association, et « l'Orient des femmes » dans l'Afrique du Nord française.


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